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Making A Difference – Thoughts, Observations and Opinions
This is Dave Brock’s Blog.
It offers my views on a variety of business, sales, marketing, and leadership topic. My goal is to make a difference for you, the reader, in both your professional and personal lives.
Latest Posts
Pipeline Quality And Integrity
I must have done thousands of pipeline reviews over my career. Somewhat casually, I toss around the terms “Pipeline Quality And Integrity” Usually, we get into a discussion about what these things mean–it’s dangerous to assume people understand. But I usually talk about those terms collectively, that is I don’t differentiate between “Quality” and “Integrity.” Up until yesterday, no one had ever asked me, “What do you mean by integrity? Are you suggesting my sales people may be lacking integrity? Or are you really talking about quality?” The question caused me to pause and think a moment. As I reflected, […]
Why Do 95% Of Customers Buy The Last Day Of The Quarter?
If I’m to believe the pipelines I spend lots of time reviewing, there is an odd phenomenon, at least 95% of customers make their purchase decisions and issue POs on the last day of the quarter. At least that’s the data sales people tend to share with me. Every pipeline I look at says the same thing. I got to wondering about that. Since we are in Q4, I think it’s remarkable and very kind of customers to come in from their holidays on December 31, to hand us POs. I worry them might get writer’s cramp, signing all the […]
Deal Strategies, Helping The Customer Buy
Recently I wrote, “What If We Kept The Target Close Date Sacred?” It focused on improving our pipeline management, discipline, and integrity. But the way we address these issues is in our deal strategies and how we engage the customer in each deal. Most of the time and too much of our training focus on the things we must do to sell our solutions to the customer. We qualify them, we identify their needs and priorities, we understand who’s involved in the decision, who the competitors are, and develop plans to get the customer to select us. We politely address […]
What If We Kept “Target Close Date” Sacred?
Just finished one of those “aha” conversations with a client. Thought I would share the concepts with you. One of the things I pay a lot of attention to, as I review pipelines or deal strategies, is the Target Close Date, and how many times that date has been changed. I believe sales people should do everything possible to: Identify the most realistic target close date possible. Do everything possible to keep that date sacred. Sadly, most target close dates seem to be unrealistic and meaningless. They are driven by what a sales person (or their manager) wants or needs, […]
“They Aren’t Using CRM!!!”
The first time a sales manager made this statement to me, in frustration, was about 20 years ago. Since then, it’s become the common complaint I hear from managers (If I had a nickel for every time…….) It’s what happens next that explains a large part of the problem, I always ask, “Let’s sign onto your CRM system and take a look at what’s going on…..” You can probably guess what happens. These managers who expect their people to use CRM struggle in using CRM. If they are complaining about the lack of utilization, one would expect they can show […]
The Pipeline Review
I was meeting with a client, we were doing the first pipeline review as part of their implementation of the Sales Execution Framework. Pipeline reviews are a great starting point for the process, a good pipeline review helps identify and isolate potential challenges as well as the performance leverage points. The client was a very large company, the current pipeline had thousands of opportunities. They had always done pipeline reviews—I suspect a number of the managers were thinking, “Why are we doing this, we do them all the time–isn’t there a better way to identify our performance leverage points?” But […]